Qiu Xiaolong

• Born: 1953
• Place of Birth: Shanghai, China

TYPE OF PLOT: Police procedural

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Chief Inspector Chen, 2000-2023

Contribution

Literary reviewers warmly greeted Qiu Xiaolong’s Chief Inspector Chen novels, albeit more for their setting and literary texture than for their plots. Before the first in the series, Death of a Red Heroine, appeared in 2000, relatively few novels in English dealt with the changes taking place in the People’s Republic of China in the 1990s from a Chinese point of view. Accordingly, Qiu’s descriptions of his native Shanghai piqued the interest of critics and readers alike. The novels reveal an exuberant nation transitioning from a largely closed, state-controlled economy and society to a much more open, capitalistic society. They also portray the conflicts between the Communist Party and the new openness and between traditional Chinese values and the modern mania for material wealth.

Although some reviewers found Qiu’s English prose style somewhat stilted and his text burdened with explanations of Chinese culture, many cited the freshness of his writing. It was said to bring an engaging realism to his characters and convey vivid information about Chinese cuisine and architecture. Moreover, critics considered his inclusion of Chinese and English poetry as innovative, moving, and evocative in establishing the intellectual milieu of Shanghai. Death of a Red Heroine was awarded the 2001 Anthony Award for Best First Mystery and named one of the year’s best five political novels by The Wall Street Journal and one of the ten best books by National Public Radio in 2000.

Biography

Qiu Xiaolong was born in the Chinese port city of Shanghai in 1953, just four years after the Communist Party led by established the People’s Republic of China. A shop owner, Qiu’s father was classified as a capitalist during China’s massive internal restructuring, the Cultural Revolution (1969-1976), and forced to write a “confession.” Because his father had undergone eye surgery and was temporarily unable to see, Qiu wrote the confession for him, joking later that it was the beginning of his writing career. At the age of sixteen, Qiu suffered a serious case of bronchitis. It kept him bedridden at home while most of his classmates were sent away for re-education under the Educated Youths Going to the Countryside program. While reading to amuse himself, he developed a serious interest in writing. In 1977, he began studying English and entered the East Chinese Normal University. He subsequently studied at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, earning a Master’s degree in Western Literature.

In the early 1980s, Qiu became an assistant research professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science. He began writing poetry and stories in Chinese. He translated English and American literature, including the works of T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. After winning awards for his translations and poetry, he became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association. In 1986, he traveled to the United States for the first time, attending the third Chinese American Writers’ Conference. He returned in 1988 to study for a Doctorate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, on a Ford Foundation grant. The following year, the Chinese government suppressed a student rebellion in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which profoundly disturbed Qiu. He decided to defect and remained in St. Louis, where his wife, Wang Lijun, joined him. They have a daughter, Julia.

Qiu became a college instructor, teaching Chinese language and literature, and a writer. He also translated Western crime fiction into Chinese and Chinese poetry into English. He published Treasury of Chinese Love Poems: In Chinese and English in 2003. The same year, his first book of English poetry, Lines Around China (2003), appeared and earned him a Missouri Arts Council Writers’ Biennial Award. He told an interviewer that he began writing fiction about his homeland to explore the changing conditions in Shanghai during the 1990s. It was not his initial intention to write a mystery story. That it turned into one, sold well, was translated into ten languages, and resulted in demands for sequels from his publisher astonished him. He continues to write poetry and fiction. Known for his self-deprecating manner and humor, Qiu has maintained contact with China, periodically returning to Shanghai to renew his familiarity with its food, literary culture, and evolving society. With Death of a Red Heroine (2000), Qiu began his Inspector Chen Cao series, which expanded to include thirteen novels with the publishing of Love and Murder in the Time of Covid in 2023.

Analysis

Qiu Xiaolong’s mystery novels are set and thematically centered in Shanghai in the 1990s when the nation was swiftly transitioning from a centrally planned economy to an open marketplace based on capitalism. Although the novels are not told exclusively from the point of view of Chief Inspector Chen Cao, he is the primary means by which Qiu exposes the deep turmoil of that transition. The fictional detective serves as an alter ego for the author, whose concern for his hometown informs nearly all of his writing. However, as Qiu insisted to interviewers, Chen differs markedly in character from him. Qiu remarked that he does not much care for his protagonist. Chen is loosely based on a friend of Qiu, a literature student who became a police officer. Like modern China, Chen makes his uncertain way in life by struggling with fundamental contradictions. From these contradictions emerge the specific themes of the Chen series.

Chen is dutiful and loyal. He values his relations with those around him, especially his partner, Detective Yu Guangming; Yu’s father, Old Hunter; and Yu’s wife, Peiqin. Accordingly, he is modest and generous, but his high rank means he must often keep information from them and expose them to dangers during his investigations for the special cases squad of the Shanghai Police Bureau. In that position, he is a Communist Party member, and his first loyalty requires him to always act in the “interest of the party.” His job is politically delicate in that he must solve cases even when the solutions might expose the party to internal or international criticism, yet he must prevent such exposure. Moreover, Chen’s dedication to his job brings him into unintentional conflict with his mother, to whom he maintains a deep devotion, as Chinese traditional values require. His mother wants him to marry and produce grandchildren, but he lacks the time for romance and the inclination to dwell on his desires.

Nowhere does the conflict between traditional values and modern life become more evident than in Chen’s dealings with corruption. Corruption permeates Qiu’s novels, reflecting the widespread pursuit of selfish interests by government leaders, bureaucrats, and businesspeople at all levels in China. In A Case of Two Cities (2006), in the course of investigating a scandal involving Xing Xing, a businessman made wealthy through his connections to high-ranking party members, Chen discovers that the Communist Party wishes to make the businessman a scapegoat, punishing him but not changing the underlying corruption. He finds that corruption goes beyond the party, being ingrained in Chinese society. The characters in A Case of Two Cities speak of a “white way” and a “black way” to accomplish nearly every public action—the officially approved or legal means in contrast with the underground, black-market way, often involving bribery. Chen himself engages in corrupt practices because of his loyalty to friends. For example, he uses his clout as a chief inspector to get a job as a traffic monitor for his partner’s father, Old Hunter, a retired police officer who cannot survive on his pension. He also does favors for several businesspeople who help him, at least one of whom has connections to organized crime.

As Qiu vividly shows, the white-way and black-way conflict arises from China's rapid economic and social change. The oldest generation, represented by Old Hunter, spent their lives with an “iron rice bowl” economy, guaranteed a job and health care from cradle to grave. The Communist Party taught them to believe that everyone should receive equal treatment. The liberalizing economic policies of Deng Xiaoping changed that. Proclaiming that it is “glorious to be wealthy,” Deng encouraged entrepreneurship and capitalism. It bewildered the older generation, but many who grew up during and after the Cultural Revolution, like Chen, seized any opportunity to grow rich. Many became wealthy, and their free spending drove up prices in urban China, so those dependent on the old system could not handle the cost of living in Shanghai. They sank into poverty, creating an economic gap between young and old and between country people and city people. As one character bitterly quips in A Case of Two Cities, “The gap between rich and poor is really like that between cloud and clod.” To survive, many poor must resort to the black way to get the food and services they need.

Qiu finds a spiritual vacuum in post-Maoist China. The values of loyalty to the state, mass political action, and contentment with an equal share are obsolete. Partly, the lingering trauma from the Cultural Revolution is responsible. The deprivations and turmoil of that era left the young, like Qiu, longing for security and liberties. The moribund efforts to sustain the old communist values are symbolized in Death of a Red Heroine by a young woman who is named a National Model Worker at a time when the distinction no longer means much. In the place of communist values, Qiu writes, rampant materialism and the scramble for money and social advantages have come. This covetousness disillusions Chen and many like him, who still owe their careers to the autocratic but increasingly venal one-party system. Moreover, many Chinese grew increasingly enamored of Western culture and material goods in the 1990s. Chen is among them. He likes American poetry and moves slowly toward a romance with an American US Marshal, Catherine Rohn, his occasional partner in A Loyal Character Dancer (2002) and A Case of Two Cities.

Chen follows the advice of his father, a Confucian scholar, to negotiate among his conflicting interests: A man must recognize what he can do and what he cannot do. Chen resolves to persevere in bringing as much justice for people experiencing poverty and victimization as the party will allow, whatever the personal cost to him.

Death of a Red Heroine

Death of a Red Heroine focuses on a beautiful young clerk, honored as a National Model Worker, who is found murdered in Shanghai in 1990. Chief Inspector Chen investigates her murder, following an elaborate sequence of shadowy clues and revelations until he discovers that the culprit appears to be the pampered son of a high-ranking Communist Party official and, therefore, untouchable for political reasons. Chen sees the case as the slaying of a proletariat hero by a corrupt member of the oligarchy. Despite the pressure on Chen to end the investigation, he arrests the young man, who is tried and executed the same day. The scandal besmirches but does not damage the party, and Chen earns a reputation as a trustworthy law enforcement official.

A Loyal Character Dancer

In A Loyal Character Dancer (2002), Chief Inspector Chen teams with Inspector Catherine Rohn of the US Marshal Service to track down the missing wife of a witness in an important international case involving the smuggling of illegal workers to the United States. Their investigation uncovers unsettling connivance between police officers and gangsters, witnesses the aftermath of injustices wrought by the Cultural Revolution, and reveals a government both reluctant to expose its own corruption but eager to appear cooperative in international affairs. Chen and Rohn become close friends and are on the verge of an affair when she must return to the United States as the fugitive has been located because of Chen’s spectacular hunches and imperturbable diligence.

When Red Is Black

When an internationally known dissident writer, Yin Lige, is murdered in her shabby apartment in When Red Is Black (2004), people suspect that the murder was politically motivated. Chief Inspector Chen’s squad is called in to catch the murderer without embarrassing the party. While Chen is on leave (translating a business brochure to make money to pay for his mother’s medical care), Detective Yu does the footwork. Still, Chen remains the strategist of the investigation. The team not only finds the murderer but also discovers that Yin’s reputation is based on plagiarism from a book by her teacher and lover, a famous but denounced professor who died during the Cultural Revolution. The case highlights a scar left by the fanatical Red Guard that dominated the era, the government’s continued suppression of literature for tenuous political reasons, and the entanglement of quid pro quo friendships that Chen needs to solve the mystery.

A Case of Two Cities

In A Case of Two Cities (2006), Chief Inspector Chen pursues a fugitive from a corruption scandal, Xing Xing, a wealthy businessman whose political connections reach the Politburo itself. Chen can conduct his investigation only when the head of the Party Central Committee for Discipline gives him carte blanche. However, as he closes in on the solution, some people in the party hierarchy become alarmed. They deflect Chen by sending him to the United States as the head of a writers’ delegation. Detective Yu continues the investigation in China while Chen manages to track down Xing in Los Angeles with the help of his friend Catherine Rohn of the US Marshal Service. Chen arrests Xing, but at a high cost: Two people close to Chen are murdered, and he is targeted. Xing is punished, but high-level corruption appears untouched. The party wants to appear to be battling corruption, but nothing more—a source of self-doubt and chagrin to Chen. The novel ends with several themes unresolved, including the reignited love interest with Rohn. Despite his uneasiness in his job and danger, Chen resolves to persevere.

Subsequent novels in the Inspector Chen Cao series include Red Mandarin Dress (2007), The Mao Case (2009), Don't Cry, Tai Lake (2012), Enigma of China (2013), Shanghai Redemption (2015), Hold Your Breath, China (2019), Becoming Inspector Chen (2020), Inspector Chen and the Private Kitchen Murder (2021), and Love and Murder in the Time of Covid (2023). Qui has also continued to publish original and translations of poetry, in addition to stand-alone fiction and nonfiction books, including Years of Red Dust (2010), Disappearing Shanghai (2012), and The Shadow of the Empire: A Judge Dee Investigation (2021). 

Principal Series Character:

• Chief Inspector Chen Cao is in charge of investigating politically sensitive cases for the Shanghai Police Bureau. In his mid-thirties and already an important cadre, he has an understated manner, discretion, and integrity. These help him solve difficult cases without upsetting the Communist Party, which rules China. He is also a celebrated poet and translator with an interest in American literature. His dedication to work leaves him with little time for his personal life and romance, much to the annoyance of his mother, who expects him to marry and start a family.

Bibliography

Chi, Pang-Yuan, and David Der-Wei Wang. Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Cummins, Caroline. “Qiu Xiaolong and the Chinese Enigma.” January Magazine, Nov. 2002.

French, Howard. “For Creator of Inspector Chen, China Is a Tough Case to Crack.” The New York Times, 7 Apr. 2007, p. A4.

Kinkley, Jeffrey C. “Chinese Crime Fiction.” Society, vol. 30, no. 4, May-June 1993, pp. 51-62.

Kinkley, Jeffrey C. Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.

“Profile - Qiu Xiaolong.” January Magazine, www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/QiuXiaolong.html. Accessed 31 July 2024.

“Qiu Xiaolong.” Qiu Xiaolong, www.qiuxiaolong.com/author.php. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Zhao, Henry Y. H. “The River Fans Out: Chinese Fiction Since the Late 1970’s.” European Review, vol. 11, no. 2, May 2003, pp. 193-209.